Chrome on iOS is now open source – The Verge

Google’s Chromium project lets developers poke around, test, and modify Google’s open-source browser code. But up until today, Chrome for iOS’s code wasn’t included in the open-source repository. Now, however, the company is making it public. The code wasn’t kept with the rest of the Chromium Project because of how complicated it is to actually get Chrome to run on a mobile Apple device.

All iOS browsers have to be built on top of WebKit, so in order to include Chrome for iOS in Chromium, Google needed to support WebKit in addition to Blink, Chrome’s own rendering engine for other platforms. But over the past several years, the Chrome team changed its code in order to upstream it into Chromium. This change and inclusion in the open-source browser project will speed up development, Google says, and will let more users test for bugs or vulnerabilities. We might also see the release of new third-party iOS browsers. Woop. Check the code here.